The Space Between
by DavidB226Morris
Summary: What happened to Jack Bauer after Day 2 Reloaded, and how he and Sydney ended up working together to stop the apocalypse that occured at the end of Alias Season 4. Trailer for Day 3


**Note: This is not an official story in my 24-ALias saga. Rather it is a bridge/teaser between Day 2 Reloaded and the new Day 3, which I intend to begin posting in the next few days. You don't have to read it to understand what's goign to happen on Day3, but it will definitely help.**

**This story would not be possible without the help of my beta reader/ collaborator John who has been a huge help in getting the last story written and this story published. I am extremely grateful for all he has done and all he will do.**

**The Usual disclaimers for both 24 and Alias apply to this story.**

**Here we go, ladies and germs**

Jack Bauer, head of the covert agency known as APO, reflected on why he was in the middle of a ghost town of a Russian city, teamed up with a world renowned terrorist, and wondered if his days weren't more normal when he was head of CTU, LA. At least there he wasn't caught up in the middle of a conspiracy out of Nostradamus.

No, he needed to remember—the man's name was Milo Rimbaldi, and Sydney Bristow had told him about how she had run across more of his doomsday weapons than she really wanted to remember. _One Rimbaldi device to cause people to die from some kind of hemorrhagic disease, one device for spontaneous combustion, not to mention enough prophecies turn Arvin Sloane into a raving madman and mass murderer. Why did I volunteer for this?_

Had Rimbaldi not existed, Arvin Sloane might have just been another ex-CIA operative, living out a bored existence in a retirement village. Without Rimbaldi, he may not have become a terrorist psychopath, and even if he had become the mass murderer he was today, Sloane certainly wouldn't have had anything to exchange for the immunity agreement the United States government had given him. Instead, Sloane had enough devices by the great Rimbaldi that certain members in government were willing to let his infractions go unpunished.

Thankfully, no one had ever fully trusted him; otherwise he could have leveled more destruction before he had been caught by CTU several months ago, while attempting to nuke Los Angeles as part of a Covenant plot to take over the Middle East.

After Sloane's escape, he had joined forces with a creature known as Elena Derevko—and he was seriously starting to consider the entire family as bad as the Drazen hordes. Of three sisters, two were mass murderers and the third simply military intelligence. It almost made one wonder what _their_ parents were like.

Jack shook his head briefly and went back to his task, scanning over the old subway station in Sovogda. The two Bristows and Michael Vaughn had looked at him strangely when he had declined to aid in the restoration of a Russian subway train, and instead preferred to act as lookout.

"Is that why you decided to carry all that weight in the backpack?" came a voice over his shoulder.

Bauer looked up from what he was doing to spare Irina Derevko a glance. The woman was tall and relatively fit for a woman her age. Then again, given her career, he figured she would have to be. Like the rest of them, she was dressed in a form-fitting black commando suit. If the shape of her face and her overall coloring wasn't a good enough indicator of her relation to the two Bristow women, then the body shape would have definitely been a good sign.

Jack nodded and looked down into the empty coffee can he had found on the cement floor of the train platform. He had just finished layering the bottom with C4 explosive, and was about to fill it with a collection of broken glass and nails he had found lying around.

"When I was in Special Forces," Jack began, "we had to be able to carry a minimum of eighty pounds in a backpack, even when parachuting into an area. And considering how out in the open we are, I figure we need the cover."

She smiled slightly, amused as she glanced around the train station at what he had already set up. There were two hand grenades propped over the entrance, their pins pulled, and their spoons held in place by the glass jars they were in. And he had already made two addition coffee cans as makeshift claymore mines. "Aren't you a little paranoid?"

He gave her a harsh glare. "What do you know about me, Derevko?"

She smiled a little. "While I have some knowledge of your resume, Agent Bauer, I never made it a point to research you in any depth. I know mostly about your problems with the Drazen family, and that my daughter loves you rather deeply."

Jack nodded, ignoring the last comment. "Then you know about Operation Nightfall."

"The mission where you and a team were to kill Victor Drazen."

"That was the last mission where I was parachuted into a situation like this. After that time, I'm not taking any chances, especially not while Nadia's here."

She crouched down next to him. "She's lucky to have you."

He finished the last nail, then slid the can of makeshift shrapnel on top of the barricade of benches he had piled in front of the entrance. He was going to make this a choke point for anyone dumb enough to attack their position. "We were lucky. Finding someone else in the field isn't something that happens everyday." He placed his submachine gun on the barricade, then pulled out another clip. "We won't get into your position with your husband."

"Jack…my Jack…is…our entire relationship is hard to explain."

"I'll bet it is," Jack growled harshly, still not looking away from his equipment.

Irina looked at his intensity and blinked. "What are you going to do with me when this is over?"

"I haven't decided yet." Now he looked in her direction. "Given how much trouble you are, shooting you is a viable option."

"Like you did with Nina Myers?"

Jack smiled unpleasantly. "Ms. Derevko, Nina Myers killed my wife, betrayed her country, and aided mass murder. You betrayed the man you were married to, used him to kill agents of my country, and abandoned him, and your daughters, then abandoned your own country. As far as I'm concerned, you're almost as bad as Nina was. Perhaps worse. But not only are you useful to us right now, Nadia still loves you. So, for now, I'm not going to kneecap you and leave you to die here, got it?"

Irina was about to reply when an inhuman roar from down the hall echoed through the station.

"I think Marshall was right when he said this sounded like a horror movie."

Kim Bauer looked at the screen and said, "This is a nightmare."

Marshall Flinkman looked up and blinked at his apprentice. Despite getting a GED to graduate high school, Kim Bauer was smarter than her transcripts would generally make her look. Heck, she was even on the chess team. How could any nerd like Marshall argue with those kinds of creds? Not to mention that she was actually quite facile with a computer. Again, who knew?

The problem was, she was distracting. Then again, the first time Marshall caught himself looking at her, all he really needed to do was think about her father, who happened to be one of the scariest men he had ever met in his entire life.

"What's the matter?" he asked. "The escape key on that board is a little sticky, you may have to jiggle it a bit before—"

"No, the Russians are scrambling fighters to basically nuke the city. I'm trying to hack into their communications systems and divert them."

"Oh—darn. That's not good." He nudged her aside and started tapping away at the keyboard with rapid-fire clicks. "Can you get an English-to-Russian translation manual?"

"Don't bother, I speak Russian."

Marshall blinked, then looked to her. "You do?"

"Yeah…" She smiled. "My dad taught me growing up…what? He was Special Forces in Eastern Europe, of course he knows Russian."

He smiled goofily. "Great. Well, that's something."

"Should I call my dad and the team to get them out? We can't delay the fighters forever."

"Call them, but they can't get out just yet. Bombing the city before they deactivate the device will only spread the effect of the virus. Not only that, there are problems with nuclear activity… think of Chernobyl as a day at the beach without suntan lotion. This would be really, really bad. As in half-the-hemisphere-turned-to-a-Resident-Evil-game bad." He tapped in frustration at the computer. "Darn, I see your problem with it. This is… wow, this is going to take too long…"

Kim frowned, looking around at her desk. It was at least neater than Marshall's normal work area, but still cluttered…she blinked. "Don't we still have that blackmail file lying around?"

Marshall nodded absently. "The Blackwell Index, yeah, why?"

"Do you think it has any Russian defense ministers in it?"

"Yeah, sure, why?" he asked as he kept up the hack…then he paused, looked at her and said, "Yeah, that's a good idea."

Jack Bauer looked down the hallway and wondered if Marshall wasn't, to some degree, prescient, as the hordes of infected human beings rushed down the hallway towards them.

"Sydney!" Jack called out as he started emptying his clip into the rushing masses. "Get the train moving!"

He dropped to the ground as the first claymore mines went off. They had both been set into the corners by the entrance, set at a fixed 45 degree angle, so the spread of the shrapnel would cover the entire hallway. The accelerated discharge cut through bone and tendon and ankle, crippling them even if they were actual zombies.

"Irina, go!" Jack barked at her. He sprang to his feet again, firing into the mass coming at him. The infected continued to charge, heedless of his weapons fire, as though he were in a zombie film.

_Damnit_, he thought_, things were so much more normal in LA_.

He ejected the empty clip from his gun, reloaded, and continued firing as the bodies began to pile up, one atop the other. He burned through the second clip in short order. After blasting through sixty rounds of ammunition, as well as two makeshift claymores, he had already piled up dozens of bodies, creating a barricade out of them, not all of them dead. If any of them managed to climb over the pile, there would still be his last claymore to tend with. It was time to leave.

Jack drew his sidearm, firing at the two grenades. The jars shattered, releasing the spoons from the grenades, dropping them into the mass behind the barricade of bodies. He turned and ran for the train—

Until a stream of gunfire cut a line directly in front of him, forcing him back behind a pillar in the train station.

"Hello, Agent Bauer," came the light voice of the second most vile creature Jack had ever met.

Jack cursed and reloaded his submachine gun. "Sloane, you son of a bitch, what the hell do you think you're doing!"

"Fulfilling prophecy, Bauer," Sloane voice came over the sounds of weapons fire.

Jack looked out from behind the pillar. The muzzle flashes from the train showed that he had some cover from the train, but it still needed power to move. Nadia was already waiting to sprint out and throw the switch.

Bauer's eyes narrowed. It would be a cold day in hell before another woman he loved would be subject to gunfire.

He looked back to his barricade. The zombie-like citizens of Sovogda were already climbing over the pile of bodies he had mounted up. Between them and the assault team, it wasn't hard to decide who he'd rather face. He reached over for the last claymore he had designed, then held it ready, braced to be thrown.

He looked towards his girlfriend and said, "Nadia! Now!" then hurled the claymore out, its open end pointed towards Sloane's assault team.

The claymore exploded, showering the enemy with shrapnel as Jack charged out into the open, he fired in controlled, even bursts as cover from the train pushed back Sloane's men. Four of them were already dead and on the ground, several others obviously wounded.

One of those men, his chest covered with holes in his shirt, the wounds gaping with blood, was Arvin Sloane.

Jack followed it up with one last discouraging feature—a hand grenade. He tossed it towards the assault team and ran across their field of fire, heading for the train while firing at them as he passed.

The train's power started up and Jack looked to Nadia. She had thrown the switch to start the train, and was already running for it. Bauer looked to the zombies as they broke through his barricade. He fired off several more rounds in their direction, but the zombies were channeled towards Sloane's assault team by his blockade, leaving Nadia free to run for the train. She hopped on board with ease, he joined him sooner after.

They wrapped arms around each other and Nadia panted, "That was close."

"I'm sure it could have been worse," he said. "I'm starting to miss CTU."

Jack settled down, next to Sydney and Vaughn. "Now what? We go to the building, take out their security, and capture Elena in order to disarm the device, right?"

"Is that too easy for you, Agent Bauer?" Jack Bristow said from farther down in the train.

Jack leaned his head against the wall of the subway car and sighed, calming down a little. "I'm just used to my problems being more complex and taking longer to solve. I don't deal with Bond villains on a regular basis." His eyes opened, then he locked onto Vaughn. "Sydney, Nadia, could you excuse us a moment?"

Sydney looked from Nadia to Bauer. "Why? What's this about?"

"Another matter," Bauer said, not looking away. Since he was technically her boss, Syd relented. Nadia squeezed his hand before she followed her sister up to join Irina and Bristow.

"What did Irina say to you back at the train platform?"

Michael frowned, uncertain of what to say. "I didn't know you noticed."

"I've been managing APO for months, and CTU for several years before that, I can keep track of five conversations and wire endless claymore mines."

"It was private."

Jack's gaze hardened, and he leaned in to Vaughn. "At the moment, I'm thirty seconds away from killing the mother of my girlfriend. Right now, you're just her future brother-in-law. _What did she say to you?_"

Vaughn cleared his throat nervously. "She knows my name isn't Michael Vaughn."

Jack eyed him a moment, then looked at his watch. "You have five minutes."

Four minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, Jack nodded. "You proposed to Sydney on the plane. Cancel any plans or trips you were going to take, especially Santa Barbara."

Michael's fist clenched, like he was about to strike Bauer. Jack shook his head. "You don't want the romantic getaway she's been planning for years to turn into her worse memory—when she discovers that her lover has been lying to her…like her mother did with her father, for instance?"

Michael sighed, then nodded. "You're right. Do you want me to turn myself in? Should I talk to the CIA? What—"

Jack waved his concern away. "At the moment, don't worry about that. Right now, we have enough trouble with making sure the city we're in doesn't explode while we're in it."

The assault team at the train station pushed back the local Zombies, and dragged off their wounded.

Except for Arvin Sloane, who calmly walked through he fray, his wounds healing up before the eyes of one gunman, who was quickly trounced upon by several of the infected residents.

Jack Bauer looked up at the giant red ball. "I think we're here."

"Thanks, we noticed," Sydney replied.

The satellite phone squawked and Sydney answered. "Yes Marshall?"

After a moment, she cursed, then lowered the phone. "According to Kim and Marshall, Elena is going to use the Russian satellite to distribute the Rimbaldi frequency worldwide. Once it goes online, the signal will be broadcast. Include that with Elena's getting ready to infect the word's water, we'll be screwed."

Irina nodded. "We need to shut down the device."

"What about the aftereffects?" Vaughn asked. He looked to Sydney. "Remember the last time we disabled one of these? We nearly drowned in the process. If this thing is infected—"

"We can cut the wires in the device to reverse the process."

Bauer shook his head. "No. Elena is too much like the rest of your family—if she's heard you're out, she wouldn't risk having the same wiring scheme."

"We'll need Elena," Syd concluded. She raised the phone to her mouth again. "Can you get a thermal scan with the satellite?"

Kim's voice could be heard through the speaker. "Twentieth floor, massive amount of people. At least twenty."

Bauer nodded. "That's probably them. Sydney, head to the roof, get ready to disarm the bomb. We'll radio you after get the proper wires from Elena."

They moved into the lobby, straight into the elevator. "Hit 19, and the roof," Bauer said. "We'll take the stairs up to 20."

Sydney nodded, and they waited as the numbers climbed. When they poured out of the elevator, Sydney grabbed Vaughn, and pulled him back. "Just in case; yes, I'll gonna marry you."

They both smiled at each other, and Vaughn stepped back just as the elevator doors closed between them.

"Now that you're quite done, can we save the world now?' Jack Bristow said dryly.

Vaughn smiled sheepishly. "Sure. Why not?" He looked to the other Jack. "By the way, Bauer, you still have some C4 left?"

The former CTU head nodded. "Why?"

"Because we might want to do some three dimensional maneuvering. Get Marshall back on the phone, we have to ask him just how good he is with the thermal imaging."

Marshall relaxed—as much as he could in this situation. He wasn't used to working with a computer person who could actually mimic him. Sure, Kim Bauer couldn't make any of the intuitional leaps that he could, and he wouldn't put her anywhere _near_ his "Q-gear", but as a computer person, she was competent—not that other people around him weren't competent, but most computer people sat back and were blown away. Kim actually stopped, looked, and tried to figure out what he was doing. She could mimic what he did, and do variations with the principles, but she wasn't capable of breaking through completely left-field computer tech without help.

He picked up the phone. "Flinkman."

"Marshall," Vaughn said, "how good are you with the thermal imaging?"

"That depends, how much resolution do you want? I can't show you their sweat glands, but I can show you strands of hair. Why?"

"We need to know exactly where Elena Derevko is right now."

Marshall frowned, looked at how far Kim had gone towards hacking into the Russian satellites, and saw it was almost time for him to take over. "I'm going to give you to Bauer now—not Jack, the other Bauer, the one with br—to Kim. Hold please."

Vaughn looked up at the ceiling, where it had a wide ring of C4 pressed into it. He looked down at the imager to make certain she was there.

And Elenya stood in the middle of the circle, on the floor immediately above.

Jack Bristow and his wife stood ready, each with four grenades, pins out and ready.

Bauer and Nadia were already on the 20th floor, having taken out the guards with silenced pistols.

Vaughn detonated the C4, and everything happened at once.

The floor fell out from beneath Elena Derevko, making her crash to the floor below.

Bauer and Nadia wheeled into the control room above, spraying it with automatic fire.

Jack Bristow and Irina hurled grenades through the hole to the four corners of the room above.

Thirteen seconds later, the shooters above wheeled back. Three seconds later, the grenades went off, killing everyone left.

Once the smoke cleared, Jack and Nadia swept through the room once more, just in case.

Bauer nodded curtly, then looked to Nadia. "Time to go down. I'll take the hole. You coming?"

Nadia smiled at him. "I'll take the stairs, thank you, Jack."

He smiled. "If you insist."

"I do…Jack, have I mentioned I love you today?"

"No, but we've been busy today. Not as long as my days in CTU, but still taking a while." He touched her shoulder. "I love you, too." He nodded toward the stairs. "Go, I'll see you in a minute."

Jack leapt through the hole, and Nadia took another look around at the control room. Back when her father ran APO, she had loved him. Strangely so, for all he had done to the world, and to her, versus what little he had done for her, or with her. And now, this, mass murder, trying to end the world. This was either insanity or pure evil. When it came to her father and Rimbaldi, she wasn't certain where that line was anymore.

But after the months with Jack, after he joined APO, and after Weiss had died, she was no longer sure that the line mattered anymore. She had her sister, and Bauer, and even a father figure in Jack Bristow—his awkwardness around her, at least, had nothing to do with her, he was as awkward with his own daughter. But it was mostly Bauer who had made the transition easier, certainly, and those times where the strain of living with her father's killers had lessened…until the day they learned that Sloane was still alive.

Nadia sighed, shook her head, and moved for the hallway, heading for the stairs. Unlike her sister, she preferred to avoid gymnastics during combat.

She moved into the staircase and started down the stairs when something heavy fell on her, like the weight of a heavy blanket, thoroughly soaked in water.

She looked down and saw it was a vest for a suicide bomber. She scrambled to take it off, when the soft, silken voice, almost euphoric with calm, flowed down. "Don't attempt to take it off, Nadia."

Nadia looked up at her father, holding a dead man's switch in his left hand. She looked down at her vest and back at him. "If you drop it, we'll both go."

"Perhaps," he said with an amused smile. "Maybe not. But you of all people should remember that the suicide vest is the tool of a fanatic. What do you think of me in relation to Rimbadli?"

She blinked. Yeah, fanatic wasn't a strong enough word for his obsession with the dead Italian. "What do you want?"

"We're going to head up to the roof."

Vaughn listened as Irina guided Sydney through the wiring plans of disarming the big red ball on the roof, then watched the two Jacks prepping for an interrogation of Elena Derevko.

Vaughn shook his head. Watching the two of them felt like a contest for the sadist of the year award. It was all usually quite clinical. There were no bamboo shoots under the fingernails for Jack Bristow—only sterile needles. Bauer, he noticed, didn't mind getting his hands dirty, and was far more of a balance between physical and psychological. But the two of them together always felt like a tag team of bad cop and psycho cop, and no one could be certain which was which.

Vaughn tried to imagine them both as in-laws. That would make Thanksgiving an interesting proposition…and that was before you counted Sloane as Irina as part of the family.

Jack Bristow was prepping a syringe full of the infected water, and said with a smile, "I've been told that I should have more fun in my job. I think this would be a good start, don't you?"

Bauer nodded at the look at Elena's face, certain that she would break then. He walked away, saying, "I'll let you and the sister-in-law handle things from here."

He stepped up to Vaughn and said, "Where's Nadia?"

Vaughn blinked. "You said she was coming 'the long way'. Didn't you mean by the roof."

Bauer's eyes hardened. "Damnit."

He turned and ran out of the room.

Sydney looked through the wiring panel as she heard the gunshot, presumably killing Elena. "Sydney, cut the blue wire. When you do, run as fast as you can. You'll have only 15 seconds."

"Sydney! I wouldn't touch that if I were you."

Syd blinked before she looked to the roof entrance. Nadia was there, with Sloane, and Sloane had her wired up with enough explosives to kill anyone within sight of them.

"What are you doing, Sloane?" she called back, slowly straightening. "It's over."

"No, not for me." He smiled, and pushed Nadia forward. "Don't even think about running for the roof, Nadia—you'd be blown up before you make it three feet." Arvin Sloane smiled, his black eyes glowing with a dark light of insanity. "You see, Sydney, Nadia is supposed to confront you now, here, at the end of the world. And she will stop you…as my tool. It is all as Rimbaldi prophesized."

A hand reached out from behind the doorframe and wrapped around the hand holding the dead man's switch. A blur swiped down on Sloane's skull, dropping him to the roof as the other hand peeled away the dead man's switch.

Jack Bauer stepped out from the hallway into sight, gun pointed at Sloane. "I _hate_ Rimbaldi."

Nadia already had the explosive vest off, and walked calmly toward Sloane, still carrying the vest. "Let him up, Jack."

Bauer backed away, and Sloane rose, his eyes still quite mad. "Nadia, I have no choice, it is my destin—"

She slapped him so hard his head snapped back with the force, and she tossed the suicide vest over his head, so that the explosives covered his sides instead of front and back. She grabbed him by the lapels and threw him towards the edge of the roof. "Sloane," she said carefully, "I gave you three chances in my life. When you used me to find your precious box, and then turned your back on me for it. Then you tried to nuke Los Angeles, and now this." She followed up with a kick to his head that caused teeth to come flying out. She grabbed him again, and hauled him to his feet. "And now, Arvin, you're out."

She twisted, and threw Arvin Sloane off the roof.

A moment later, Bauer dropped the dead man's switch.

Arvin Sloane exploded in mid-air.

"Everyone, start running," Sydney said, cutting the blue wire.

Jack Bauer looked at Irina and her husband kiss, and seriously considered pulling out his gun and shooting her right there. It probably wasn't the best way to celebrate a victory with his girlfriend, but damnit, was he the only person there who thought she should be executed now, before she perpetrated some other evil-mastermind-like stunt? With the exception of Victor Drazen, Jack had never had one enemy return to haunt him. At APO, he felt like he was fighting the same people every other week. APO would have been out of business if they only _killed_ the people they were being sent after.

So why was everyone so darned happy to let Irina Derevko get away…again?

Jack's hand tightened on the gun as she said her goodbyes to Sydney. Then he sighed, and slid the gun away. Damnit, he would have to do it some other time.

Nadia took his hand and gave him a little squeeze, and a small smile. She knew how hard it was to let anyone get away. When Sark had escaped during the capture of Anna Espinosa a few months back, he had practically gone ballistic. Letting Irina go while she was right in front of him must have been murder.

Irina looked at Nadia and Jack, and simply smiled. "Thank you, Agent Bauer. I'll try not to get on your nerves too much. Take care of my daughter for me."

At the former headquarters of Elena Dereveko, the street outside was covered with the blood of Arvin Sloane. Not from the explosion—the cause of death of suicide bomber was the concussive force of being the epicenter of the explosion. Falling more than twenty stories, however, created a mess.

Hours went by, and slowly, very slowly, Arvin Sloane started to move, pushing himself to his feet. He was covered in his own blood, and he was as thirsty as a dying man in the desert, but he was alive.

Several weeks ago, with the help of Elena Derevko's organization, he had found Milo Rimbaldi's device to create eternal life.

Sloane looked up at the top f the building, and sighed. There was more of the prophecy to fulfill, and he would be the one to do it.

_Epilogue:_

Sydney and Vaughn did not go on vacation, as Jack had recommended. Despite the romance of it, security came first…especially when, a week later, Syd had discovered she was pregnant.

The morning after, Sydney Bristow walked into Jack Bauer's office, and said, "Jack… do you think CTU would have a desk job open for me?"


End file.
